Suggestions for Designing
Effective Formal Writing Assignments
by Brad Hughes
 WAC
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College of Letters and Science University of Wisconsin-Madison
Create opportunities for writing to be a process of thinking and of revising.
- Think in terms of writing projects rather than a paper assignment with a single due date. If it's possible to do so, assign a series of short papers rather than one long one. Multiple assignments encourage active learning throughout the semester, provide opportunities for students to connect new knowledge to knowledge they have already mastered, and help students improve their thinking and writing through practice and response.
- If you do assign a longer paper, break the assignment into smaller parts which students work on throughout the semester. For example, have students submit a prospectus (description and plan for the paper) for your comments relatively early in the semester (some instructors distribute copies to the entire class to encourage discussion among students about their papers). Have students submit a draft (a few weeks before the final due date for the paper) for peer review and for brief comments from you; the papers can then be revised based on the questions that readers posed and the advice offered.
Provide opportunities for students to talk about their writing while it's in progress:
- Brief class time set aside for students to discuss their topics or drafts in pairs or groups;
- Brief conferences with you;
- Student presentations about their papers.
In designing a series of assignments, establish a logical sequence:
- Begin with easier kinds of thinking about course material (such as summary of readings or lecture).
- Progress toward more difficult (argument, speculation, evaluation, application). Another way to think of this: begin with more narrowly focused questions and move toward more ill-defined questions or problems, ones without easy answers.
Use informal writing and other class activities as starting points for formal papers.
Always provide students with written versions of assignments.
- In your assignments, make your expectations clear (scope, depth, format, length, resources to be used).
- Make sure your central question stands out clearly (use boldface or spacing to highlight it).
- Try to pose some subquestions that will guide students' thinking and offer advice about shaping ideas and presenting them to a reader.
- And let students know (again, in writing) how closely you want them to follow your assignment. (Some faculty consider assignments to be suggestions or possibilities to get students thinking; others want students to respond exactly to the assignment.)
Identify evaluation criteria, especially ones linked to the important intellectual demands of the assignment.
If a paper assignment involves writing from sources, tell students (in the assignment) how you want them to acknowledge their sources.
- If you want them to use a particular documentation system, let them know.
- If you don't care which documentation system they use as long as they are consistent, let them know that; but consider suggesting one or two systems as possibilities. And let students know where they can learn how to use these systems.
- If students are drawing only from course readings and informal references are appropriate, let them know that.
Specify an audience for each assignment, even if you just indicate that students should be writing for their classmates--people who have read many of the same materials but have not thought specifically about the author's topic.
When you make an assignment, spend some class time discussing it.
- A very effective way to help students understand your assignment and your standards is to discuss in class one or two successful sample papers written by your students in previous semesters. There's no need to discuss the entire papers during class; you can effectively highlight key points you want students to see in them. Try to be as specific as you can in identifying what's successful about a paper.
When you return papers, spend some class time discussing them--perhaps sharing and discussing examples of successful papers and explaining some common problems in the papers.
Encourage students to take advantage of instruction offered by the College Writing Lab.
Encourage, encourage, encourage!